"Orval Freemont?"
The man smiled. "That's me."
Darya went into her speech—a lie came easily, the twenty-fifth time around. Five minutes later she was sitting in the most comfortable chair of the little house, drinking tea and listening to Orval Freemont's enthusiastic reminiscences of Quintus Bloom.
"My very first class, that was, when I was just a youngster in Fogline and none too sure of myself. Of course, your first class is always special, and you never forget the children in it." Freemont grinned at Darya, making her wish he had been her first teacher. "But even allowing for that, Quintus Bloom was something special."
"Special how?"
"I've probably taught other children as smart as Quintus, but never, then or since, have I had anyone who wanted so much to be Number One. He wouldn't have heard of the word ambition, that first day in my class. But he already had it. Did you know, that very day he changed his own name? He came to class as John Jones, but he'd already decided that was too ordinary for what he intended to be. He wanted a special name. He announced that from now on he was Quintus Bloom, and he refused to answer to anything else. And he tried so hard, it was frightening. He'd do anything to be top, even if it meant cheating a little and hoping I wouldn't notice." Orval Freemont noticed Darya's expression. "Don't be shocked; all children tend to do that. Of course, part of the reason in his case was that he was a bit of an outcast. You know how cruel little kids can be. Quintus had this awful skin condition, big red sores on his face and on his arms and legs, and nothing seemed to clear them up."
"He has them still."
"That's a shame. Nerves, I suspect, and I bet he still picks at them when he thinks nobody's looking. Whatever the cause, it didn't make his sores and scabs any less real. The other kids called him Scabby, behind my back. He didn't say much, poor little lad, just put his head down and worked harder than ever. If you had come to me, even then, and asked me which of my pupils over the years was most likely to succeed, I'd have said Quintus Bloom. He needed it, the others didn't."
"Had he any other special talents that you noticed?"
"He sure did. He was the best, clearest writer for his age that I've ever met. Even when he got something wrong, I'd sometimes give him a little extra credit just for the way he said it."
"I don't suppose you kept anything that he wrote, back from his first years in school?"
Orval Freemont shook his head. "Wish I had. It didn't occur to me that Quintus would become so famous, or maybe I would have. But you know how it is; the little kids grow older, and the next class of young ones comes in, and your mind is suddenly all on them. That's what keeps you young. I remember Quintus, and I always will, but I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about him."
Darya glanced at her watch and stood up. "I have to get back to Fogline, or I'll be away another whole day. I really appreciate your time. You know, I've dealt a lot with teachers, and I've learned to appreciate the good ones. If you wanted to, you could be teaching in a university instead of an elementary school."
Freemont laughed, took Darya's cup as she handed it to him, and walked with her to the door. "You mean, if I were willing to make the sacrifice, and give up the rewards." He smiled gently at her bewildered look, "By the time that you reached university age, Ms. Lang, you were already formed as a person. But come to me as a little girl of five or six, and I can have a real say in what you'll become. That's my reward. That's why I say I have the best job in the universe."
Darya paused on the threshold. "Do you think you did that with Quintus Bloom—shaped him?"
Orval Freemont looked thoughtful, more than he had at any point in their whole meeting. "I'd like to think so. But, you know, I suspect that Quintus was formed long before I ever had a chance to work with him. That drive, that urge to be first and to succeed—I don't know where and when it came, but by the time I met him it was already there." He took Darya's hand, and held it for a long time. "I hope you'll write something nice about Quintus. Poor little devil, he deserves his success."
Darya hurried away, through the cold night streets of Rasmussen. She had just a few minutes to make the last shuttle. As she slipped and skated on the thin coat of ice that covered the sidewalks, she tried to measure the value of her trip to Fogline and Rasmussen. She knew Quintus Bloom much better now, that was certain. Thanks to Orval Freemont she had confirmed his strengths, and learned a little of his weaknesses.
As Darya arrived at the terminal, just in time, she realized that her visit to Jerome's World had given her something else, something she might have been happier not to have. She had seen Bloom through Orval Freemont's eyes: not as the self-confident and arrogant adult, but as a driven child, a small, lonely, and sad little boy.
Maybe the visit to Orval Freemont had been a big mistake. From now on, no matter how obnoxious he was, Darya would find it harder to hate Quintus Bloom.
Chapter Thirteen
Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom were not the only people speculating about changes in Builder artifacts. Hans Rebka was full of the same thoughts, and was possibly in a better position than the other two to take the idea seriously. He was the only person who had listened to Quintus Bloom's seminar, and then heard firsthand from Louis Nenda about the changes on Genizee and the total vanishing of Glister.
But what should he do with the knowledge? He was the action type, a general purpose trouble-shooter. He was no Quintus Bloom or Darya Lang, with their encyclopedic knowledge of every artifact in the spiral arm and their ability to detect even the slightest modification of form or function. A change would have to stand up and hit Hans in the face before he recognized it.
There had been one exception. And that, oddly enough, made his decision easier when he decided to leave Sentinel Gate.
In the days before he first met Darya Lang, Hans Rebka had contracted to lead a Fourth Alliance team to the artifact known as Paradox. At the very moment he was ready to begin, he had been reassigned to Quake and Opal—and had been furious at the switch. For weeks and weeks beforehand he had been learning everything there was to know about the spherical anomaly called Paradox. All that knowledge, so painfully acquired, then just wasted.
But maybe he could use it now, to confirm or deny the ideas of Darya Lang and Quintus Bloom. Even if he found no change to Paradox, there was still a good reason for the journey. The cold-start procedure, when Hans had been forced to open E. Crimson Tally's skull, had reminded him of another attribute of the embodied computer. This one might be the key that would unlock the mystery of Paradox.
Rebka watched the gleaming soap bubble ahead, its surface rippling in hypnotic rainbow colors. Paradox was one of the smallest of the artifacts, only fifty kilometers across. Unlike Sentinel, or many of the others, Paradox provided no impermeable barrier to an approaching ship. Exploring vessels could simply coast right through to the interior, and emerge physically unscathed. Unfortunately, as early would-be explorers of Paradox had learned (or rather, the people who found the explorers had learned) the same was not true of a ship's crew. Paradox wiped clean all stored memories, organic or inorganic. Surviving crews emerged like new-born babies, with only the most basic instincts and reflexes left to them. Data banks and computer memory on the ships were equally affected. Their contents disappeared. Any ship function that relied on the performance of a computer—and many did—failed inside Paradox. Ships had emerged with their hatches open, their temperature down to ambient space, or their drives dead.
The effect had been named: a Lotus field. That did not, unfortunately, mean that anyone in the spiral arm had the faintest idea how or why it worked, or how to neutralize it. After the first few expeditions (the first recorded expeditions—no one knew how many times Paradox had been discovered, and how many times all memory of it had been erased), the artifact was placed off-limits to all but specially trained investigators.
Investigators like Hans Rebka, with many years of experience in the fine art of avoiding disaster.
But not
like E.C. Tally. The embodied computer was staring at Paradox like a child offered a new toy. "Do you think the whole inside is a Lotus field, or is it just in a surface layer?"
"Probably in the surface. We know it starts there, and we have evidence of a lot of other interior structure in Paradox from the light that passes through it." Rebka was distracted. He was happy with the overall plan of what he wanted to do, but now he was down to practical questions. What was the best way to unwind, and then to wind back, a reel holding thirty kilometers of thin neural cable? Where would the fiber best enter the spacesuit, if the suit was to be airtight? At what point must Rebka put on his own suit?
It was a nuisance to be forced to do everything in suits, but Rebka could see no alternative. Even if the interior of Paradox, by some improbable miracle, turned out to be filled with air breathable by humans, what would happen just before entry? And what was the interior temperature of Paradox? Instrument readings gave inconsistent results.
"Sit still." He was standing behind Tally, who was suited except for the helmet. "I'm going to rehearse the whole thing just one more time."
He had already passed the neural cable through a hole in the top of the helmet, made an airtight seal at the point where it entered, and attached a neural connector plug to the end of the cable inside the helmet. He let that float free and reached forward to feel the rear of Tally's head. When he pressed on three marked points and at the same time lifted, a gleam of white bone was revealed on the back of the skull. The rear pins released, so that the upper cranium could pivot forward about the hinged line in the forehead. Tally's brain was revealed as a bulging gray ovoid sitting snugly in the skull case.
Rebka carefully lifted it out. "You all right?"
"Just fine. Of course, I cannot see. The top of my head is covering my eyes."
"I'll make this as quick as I can." Rebka felt beneath the wrinkled ball of the brain, to locate a short coiled spiral that connected the embodied computer's brain to the upper end of the body's hindbrain. "Doing it—now."
He unplugged the spiral, lifted the gray ball of the brain free, and pressed the neural connector from the suit's helmet into the plug in the hindbrain. A moment later he connected the other end of the thirty-kilometer filament to E.C. Tally's disembodied brain.
"How's that?"
"Perfectly fine." E.C. Tally's hands came up, to click the top of his skull back in position. The thin fiber ran from the back of his head to the suit's helmet, and on into the disembodied brain. "I sense a slight transmission delay."
"About two hundred microseconds. It's the two-way signal travel time through thirty kilometers of cable. Can you handle it?"
"I will become accustomed to it." Tally reached up again, and closed the suit helmet. "There. I am airtight. Does that complete our rehearsal?"
"Almost. I'm happy with all the moves that involve you, but I want to check my own suit and then take us to vacuum and back. I'll do it once you're unwired. Hold still while I switch you, then in a few minutes we'll try the whole thing for real."
Rebka opened Tally's helmet and performed the operation in reverse. He hinged the skull forward and pulled the neural connector out of the body's hindbrain. He freed Tally's brain from the other end of the fiber optic cable and plugged it once more into its hindbrain socket. Finally he clicked the cranium back to its original position.
"Here we are again." E.C. Tally lifted one suited hand, then the other. "No anomalies. What next?"
"Close your helmet. I'm going to take us to vacuum."
Rebka waited until his own suit was on and they both had their helmets locked in position. He cycled the air pressure down to zero, then slid open the hatch. They could see Paradox through the opening. It sat only a few tens of meters away, a shimmering bubble seemingly close enough to touch.
"Do you mind if I examine the artifact from outside the ship?" E.C. Tally was floating toward the hatch.
"Go ahead. Check the E/M field intensities while you're there, but make sure you don't get into trouble with the Lotus field. And remember the cable's attached to your helmet, if not to your head, so don't get tangled up."
Tally nodded. He picked up a portable field recorder and drifted out, cable unreeling behind him. Hans did not move. They were ready to start, but there was no hurry. He had survived in the past by being ultra-cautious. He wanted to review everything mentally one last time.
The steps seemed clear and simple:
Remove Tally's brain, which would stay here with him.
Connect brain and body through the neural cable.
Allow Tally's body to enter and explore Paradox, remotely controlled through the cable.
They knew from a previous experience that this would work in a Lotus field, although it had been tried only over short distances. This time E.C. could in principle go all the way to the center of Paradox. Rebka wasn't sure he was that ambitious. If Tally could bring something—anything—back from the Paradox interior, they would be breaking new ground.
And if something went wrong? Rebka couldn't think what it might be. At worst, they would lose one spacesuit, plus E.C. Tally's current body. That would be unfortunate, but Tally's brain had been re-embodied once before. If necessary, it could be returned to Miranda and embodied again.
Rebka took a deep breath. Time to begin. Where was Tally? He had been outside for a long time.
As though he had been summoned, Tally in his spacesuit came floating in through the hatch, cable reeling in ahead of him. He watched as Rebka brought the cabin back to normal air pressure. Both of them opened their helmets and Rebka began to strip off his suit.
"Before you remove your suit completely," E.C. Tally raised a gloved hand, "I want to be sure that I understand the reason for the procedure that you propose to follow."
Hans couldn't believe his ears. They had just reviewed the whole thing. In detail.
Was it possible—he had a sudden awful suspicion—was it possible that E.C. Tally had done what he had just been repeatedly warned not to do, and entered the Lotus field?
"Did you go into Paradox while you were outside?"
"A little way, yes."
"Against my strict instructions!"
"No." Tally was unabashed.
"Yes it was. You dummy, I told you not to go into Paradox."
"No. You told me not to get into trouble with the Lotus field. And I did not." Tally came floating forward, and hovered in front of Rebka. "I want to understand the reason for the procedure that we will follow, because it may be irrelevant. Perhaps you and I have had a basic misunderstanding. Are you sure that the artifact waiting outside the hatch is indeed the one known as Paradox?"
"Of course it's Paradox. You watched me fly us here. Have you gone crazy?"
"I am not sure." Tally put down the recorder that he was holding. "Maybe we both have. But I am quite sure of one thing. The object alongside which this ship is floating, whatever it is, does not possess a Lotus field at its surface."
They went outside in their suits. Hans Rebka was hair-trigger nervous, ready to accuse Tally of every kind of irresponsible behavior, until the embodied computer explained.
"The electromagnetic field readings of the recorder appeared too low. And they decreased, as I came closer to the surface of Paradox." He was holding the little recorder in one gloved hand. "I wondered if the decrease would continue, beyond the surface of Paradox. It would be easy enough to check. All I had to do was use my suit's extensor to place the recorder within the visible surface. So."
Tally attached the recorder to the extensible grip in the suit's forearm, and began to reach out toward the shimmering wall of Paradox.
"Wait!" Rebka grabbed at the extensor. "The recorder has its own computer and internal programs. The Lotus field will wipe everything—you'll ruin the recorder."
"I realized that, when the idea first came to me. However, I decided that I would easily be able to restore the recorder memory; use of the recorder as a probe could tell us exactl
y how far within Paradox the Lotus field began. I therefore continued with the experiment." The extensible arm carried the recorder forward, until it met the chromatic swirl of Paradox's surface. It vanished beyond. "I tried this several times, increasing the degree of extension and then bringing the recorder back to examine it, until the arm was at its maximum stretch of fifteen meters. As it is now."
Tally floated with the gloved hand of his suit just half a meter away from the rainbow wall of shifting soap-bubble colors.
"And I brought it back."
The little motor in the extensor unit hummed, and the recorder re-emerged from beyond the shining boundary. E.C. Tally turned, so that Hans Rebka could see the face of the recorder. Numbers glowed on its display.
"Ambient field values." Tally touched another key. "Exactly consistent with the values obtained before the recorder went inside Paradox. The recorder programs should have been erased beyond the Paradox surface. But it appears to be working perfectly."
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